Porn penis, malformed penis

ABSTRACT

This article reads viewer commentary on scene updates on the gay porn review site Way Big so as to consider audience reaction to a performer (Rick McCoy) with a congenital penis abnormality. More than 500 comments over a 19-month period help canvas attitudes towards penis appearance, attending particularly to audience expectations of the ‘porn penis’ and how McCoy measures up. The article explores audience perspectives on what place, if any, there is in gay porn for a malformed penis. Textual analysis is performed, through which two dominant positions emerge from the discourse. The first emphasizes McCoy as a ‘well known bottom’, which is argued to distract from the failings of his penis; the second rejects him outright for failing to conform to community expectations of how penises within the porn context should appear, namely as big and well formed.

KEYWORDS:

• Abnormality
• discourse
• gay pornography
• hypospadias
• penis
• Rick McCoy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Joseph Brennan http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7388-954X

Notes

1 See Maddison (2009, 35) who connects the rise of ‘Viagra culture’ with the expectation within porn that ‘penises are always hard, and always large’.

2 Lehman reverts to the term ‘penis’ elsewhere in the piece, writing for instance that ‘the penises in porn are very large’ (2007, 112).

3 Other gay porn performers nominated (see posts 9 and 23) as having hypospadias include Mario from Corbin Fisher (corbinfisher.com) and Justin LeBeau from Cocky Boys (cockyboys.com).

4 While such discussion is beyond the scope of the present article, comments such as this, which connect circumcision with mutilation of the penis, hint beyond a preference for ‘cut’ (American)/‘uncut’ (European) models in porn and towards more significant issues around penis ideals and potential feelings of lack among circumcised men – as embodied by a growing foreskin restoration movement (see Kennedy 2015) – that have implications for both performers and viewers (after all, the vast majority of circumcisions are conducted soon after birth).

5 Viewers’ comments are included as is, complete with typographic errors.

6 As is suggested by the monster's name, Hung Wankenstein was a parody of Mel Brooks’ (1974) own Universal horror films parody, Young Frankenstein.

7 The sites Blacks on Boys (blacksonboys.com) and Yuck Boys Live (yuckboyslive.com) have a similar theme. The term ‘thug’ is used in a number of sites featuring Black models, including Reality Thugs (realitythugs.com), Thug Seduction (thugseduction.net) and Thug Boy (thugboy.com).

8 At one point during McCoy's scene for the site, after turning his face into the couch while being penetrated by ‘Izzy’, McCoy receives direction: ‘Let me see your face, dude’, the cameraman says. ‘We always want to see your face’ (at 15:10 min). Accessed April 13, 2017. http://www.gayforit.eu/video/250902/He-takes-my-BBC

9 For a more detailed discussion of the ‘bottom persona’ as ascribed to male celebrities, see my (Brennan 2016b) article on Tom Daley.

10 Percentages for other positions are: 19.5% top only, 22.2% versatile as part of a ‘flip flop’ scenario and 19.5% solo/non-penetration scenes.

11 See, for instance, his Next Door Studios model interview. Accessed April 19, 2017. https://youtu.be/JNOqMFocAlo

12 In addition to the ‘absent penis’ of female-to-male performers (including but not limited to Buck Angel), I also acknowledge as an aligned subject the ‘surprise penis’ of cross-dressing and ‘pre-op’ male-to-female porn performances (see Escoffier 2011, 272–275), although discussion of these representations is outside the scope of the present article.